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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26369086">Get Under Your Skin</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilookedback/pseuds/ilookedback'>ilookedback</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>under your skin [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Mandalorian (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, Mild Angst, Takes place after season 1, Tattoos, could be read as pre-slash if you want, din is a little bit touch starved, mostly soft and quiet</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 07:08:13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,324</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26369086</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilookedback/pseuds/ilookedback</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe that’s why Paz suggested this again, a peace offering in his own way. And why Din accepted, wanting that peace embedded in his body, missing the intimacy of handing himself over to the man who used to be the boy who has always been the closest thing to a brother or a friend he’s ever had. He doesn’t mind being alone, used to his own company by now, but he aches sometimes thinking of the sensation of hands on his skin, of gentle pain and soothing touch.</p><p>Paz’s hands are still steady, bigger and rougher now than they ever were in his youth, but what he’s lost in softness he’s made up for in skill and patience, and it’s a little like a meditation now sitting here listening to the quiet, steady breaths through his helmet, regulating his own breathing to match the other man’s.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Baby Yoda &amp; The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV), The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV) &amp; Paz Vizsla</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>under your skin [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1929973</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>174</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Get Under Your Skin</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I've been wanting to write more Mando fic for a while, and recently this image came to me and felt like something to explore. This is set sometime after Season 1 and imagines that Din has found his way back to some form of reunited covert. Unbetaed.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They used to do this sometimes when they were boys, huddled together in their shared rooms in the old covert. Still in that transitory stage, no longer children but not yet men either, really, there had been some thrill in the feeling of exerting their own control and design over the bodies now hidden by their newly earned armor. Now, with so many years gone by, it seems like a lifetime since he’s felt the sweet sting of it.</p><p>Paz always had the steadiest hands and was the hardest to impress, so if you got him to agree to it, it felt like you’d won something special. Din used to win his attention often, back then. It’s been a long time since he’s felt the glowing pride of that, too. Somewhere, something had shifted between them along the way, sweet friendship turning bitter and wary, and it’s only in looking back now that they can recognize they were both at fault for the rift.</p><p>There’s new perspective to be gained when you’ve shared losses as great as theirs.</p><p>And maybe that’s why Paz suggested this again, a peace offering in his own way. And why Din accepted, wanting that peace embedded in his body, missing the intimacy of handing himself over to the man who used to be the boy who has always been the closest thing to a brother or a friend he’s ever had. He doesn’t mind being alone, used to his own company by now, but he aches sometimes thinking of the sensation of hands on his skin, of gentle pain and soothing touch.</p><p>Paz’s hands are still steady, bigger and rougher now than they ever were in his youth, but what he’s lost in softness he’s made up for in skill and patience, and it’s a little like a meditation now sitting here listening to the quiet, steady breaths through his helmet, regulating his own breathing to match the other man’s.</p><p>He doesn’t need to watch, and it would be an awkward angle anyway, so he keeps his head turned forward. He doesn’t watch Paz work but he feels the heat radiating from his body where his thighs are inches away from bracketing Din, sitting together on the edge of the bed. One leg is slung behind Din’s back and the other is pressed against his where their knees touch. Din’s bare shoulder feels hot, too, blood rushing to meet the sharp pin pricks of the needle on his skin.</p><p>The child is settled on the floor nearby, keeping a curious eye on them but mostly focused on playing with a ball one of the other foundlings in the covert had kindly given him. He’s rolling it around, watching it ricochet off the doorframe, hit the edge of the bed, and bounce off of Din’s boot. He giggles, a funny cooing noise, like he thinks Din’s kicked the ball back to him on purpose, and Din smiles and readies his foot to aim properly the next time the ball rolls his way.</p><p>“Don’t move,” Paz chides quietly. “It’ll end up looking like a flower.”</p><p>“Sorry,” Din mutters, and keeps his body carefully still. He wouldn’t mind a flower—he has one already, near his ankle, that one of the other boys in their cohort thought would be a funny joke but Din has always secretly liked—but this is too important to not draw perfectly so he doesn’t tell Paz that.</p><p>Their words have caught the baby’s attention and he toddles over to stand at their feet, lifting his arms to be picked up. When Din doesn’t move, he lets out a little grunt of annoyance and starts climbing up their legs, one tiny clawed hand gripping Din’s pant leg and the other on Paz. Paz pulls his hands back for a moment and they watch the child’s progress up the mini cliff-face he’s scaling until he finally pulls himself over the bend of their knees and tumbles forward to land on Paz’s thigh. He rights himself and tucks his body against Paz’s side, and the two men wait a moment longer to see if he’ll move but he seems content to sit and watch from his new seat.</p><p>“Curious little thing,” Paz remarks. He strokes his wrist lightly over the child’s ear and the baby preens and pushes into his touch. “Keep still now,” he warns him. The child looks up at him, guileless, and sits still in his lap.</p><p>“He listens better to you than to me,” Din says.</p><p>“That’s just how children are,” Paz replies, but he might as well have said <em>that’s how children are with me</em>, because he’s always commanded respect and acclaim from little ones in the covert, for as long as Din’s known him and ever since they weren’t much older than children themselves. Losing Paz’s regard hurts too much to be worth it, as Din knows well from experience, and even the brattiest children would go quiet if he made note of their attitude.</p><p>Paz touches his arm again, pulling the skin taut so he can start to work the needle in shallow, poking jabs. Din turns his head to look at the baby and finds him sitting wide-eyed and fascinated, idly chewing on the hem of his sleeve as he watches Paz work.</p><p><em>You are as its father</em> is a strange thing to reckon with after two decades spent mostly alone. It keeps bringing odd things to his mind. Distant scraps of memory stuck under his skin like shrapnel, lodged so deep and for so long that they are part of him but quiet and unseen so that he needs to rub his fingers along the healed-over wounds to feel their presence. His mother singing, words in an old language he doesn’t speak anymore. His father’s warm eyes, crinkling at the corners from smiling at him.</p><p>He wonders what the child will remember of him, when he’s gone. If his legacy will feel like an injury healed and past or like ink carefully deposited just under the surface of your skin, a permanent design chosen to record some meaning you don’t want to be able to forget.</p><p>Paz speaks again and Din watches the child tip his head back curiously at the low rumble of his voice. “It’s too bad he’s so little,” he says. “I’d give him a matching mark. Your clan of two.”</p><p>Din huffs a laugh, thinking of it. “He’s just a baby,” he says, and he feels a tiny pang of sadness, a shard of something shifting in the muscle of his chest, something that might be a remnant of the pain reflected in his parents’ eyes when they’d shut the door on his hiding place long ago.</p><p>Paz is quiet for a moment, wiping away the pooled ink on Din’s skin and leaning in to examine his work. “Maybe he’ll grow,” he says. Din wonders.</p><p>“Maybe,” he agrees. “He eats a lot.”</p><p>“He takes after you,” Paz teases.</p><p>“Sure,” Din says, laughing. “We have the same appetite, except he prefers live frogs.”</p><p>The baby chuckles, too, the throaty, hiccuping chirp he makes when he wants to be in on a joke. Paz bounces his leg and the child rolls onto his back, grinning up at them.</p><p>“Such a funny little thing,” Paz says, all amused, wondering tone. “It’s good that you kept him. It’s right that he’s with us.”</p><p>He shouldn’t need the assurance but it loosens something inside him, sparks a warm glow in his chest that burns away a little of the pain he’s been reflecting on. He takes a breath, feeling the air in his lungs and the buzzing ache of new ink in his shoulder, and rests his hand on the child’s belly, feeling him breathe in too.</p><p>“This is the way,” he says, and Paz echoes it as he wipes clean the extra pigment from the inked-in mudhorn marking his skin.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>(Just in case it's not clear, Paz is doing a stick and poke tattoo here. Please do not take this fic as an endorsement of DIY/at-home tattooing lol.)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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